Brand logos to appear in Google search results

What you need to know about Google's policy and its implications for logo and branding design.

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In our comprehensive guide to logo design, we remind you that your design must be flexible enough to scale to a range of sizes, and work in a variety of different arenas, from huge billboards to mobile apps to TV advertising. And now there's another use to bear in mind - because Google has just announced that company logos will soon start appearing in its search result pages.

Put simply, companies can now have their logo appear in Google search results in the same way that writers and authors display their headshots. It's a little bit of a fiddly process, involving adding some markup to your site's HTML: you'll find full technical details here while this post looks at the implications for SEO.

The change was announced at Google I/O, the company's annual conference, along with a ton of announcements about everything from new service Google Music to redesigns of Google Maps and Google+. For a comprehensive round up of the announcements, check out this special report from our sister site Tech Radar.